"Get Thee to a Nunnery"

St. Mary Magdalene's Catholic Parish in Brackettville, Texas is not unique in having all kinds of financial monkeyshines!


From: The New Oxford Review. October 2009.

"Michael Madden, a former Connecticut priest, claims that Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, who played a leading national role in responding to the clerical sex - abuse scandal in the Church, threatened to send him to live with nuns after he hired a private investigator to look into his pastor, Fr. Michael Jude Fay.

"Fay later pleaded guilty to a fraud charge and was sentenced in 2007 to three years in prison for stealing more than $1 million from St. John Catholic Church in Darien to finance his lavish lifestyle.

"Madden made the claim in a recent deposition for a lawsuit by the parish's bookkeeper , who claims she was harassed and threatened for exposing Fay's embezzlement (Associated Press, Aug. 3). "

The Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut's Brackettville connection!

The newly ordained Father Anton Quang Dinh Van claimed to Today's Catholic's Carol Sowa -- in the September 17, 2004 issue -- that this is where he'd first been able to begin studies for the priesthood, back in 1995.

As she wrote it up, he could now "return to college, studying first for the Bridgeport, Conn., diocese [that would have been under then - Bishop Edward M. Egan] and then for the Archdiocese of Detroit."

She then throws us this amazing literary glitch:

"After a year with the Redemptorists, he discerned he was not called to the religious life [Right on, Sister Sowa, right on! :) ], but the desire to be a diocesan priest led him to San Antonio [anyway? :) ].

NOTE: By this time, would he have been already classifiable as an asset, and if so, for who or for what, precisely?